How the G-7 is responding to the food crisis

Germany had to retool its priorities for its 2022 presidency of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations multiple times, after a new government came in late last year — and then Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Spiking food, fuel, and fertilizer costs became front and center on the agenda of the world’s highest-income nations. Sebastian Lesch, head of the sustainable agricultural supply chains unit within BMZ, the country’s federal ministry for economic cooperation and development, said Germany’s goal was to ensure that governments were coordinating with one another on a response in a way that doesn’t duplicate the efforts of other institutions. He told Devex the country felt a responsibility to ensure the food crisis was prioritized in the G-7 agenda. In May, in partnership with the World Bank, the G-7 launched a Global Alliance for Food Security. This interview is part of a Devex Pro series on how organizations are responding to the food crisis. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How is the food crisis affecting Germany’s work as G-7 president? We felt early on quite a lot of pressure of everyone looking towards Berlin, looking towards the G-7 presidency in terms of “what are the Germans going to do about it? What is it that they are going to propose?” … We came very early on with the approach of making this a global alliance, a Global Alliance for Food Security — not with the goal of creating a new institution or channeling funds through a special mechanism, but with the goal of bringing all the relevant stakeholders to the table … in the best possible way to coordinate the response against the crisis, make sure no one gets left behind, make sure that the reaction to the food security crisis would be best adapted to the needs as the crisis develops. What are your hopes for how the alliance that you formed — I don’t know if “institution” is the right word — will carry forward beyond Germany’s G-7 presidency? Really not “institution” because that’s precisely what we’re not trying to do. There’s lots of institutions in the agriculture and food systems world that we don’t want to duplicate … What we want to install is a platform for best possible coordination. And that coordination is supposed to be happening in an agile way, so not really a linear way where everybody tells everybody else what they’re doing. There’s no membership form, you don’t need to declare your membership in that there’s no entrance fee. You don’t need to put money on the table, although obviously we encourage everyone to put money on the table and have done so ourselves … But that’s not what the alliance is about. The alliance is really about that coordination. What concretely does this involve? We are creating jointly with the World Bank a dashboard that brings together available data both on agricultural markets, on needs, on donor activities, on the food security situation itself in many countries — bringing all of this together in a road map style, visualized style to provide the best basis for decision making. This is something that will go live early November. And then secondly what we are starting is dialogues on the country level where these individual situations are going to be taken into account, going to be discussed, what are the needs precisely and what is it the international community can do to help alleviate those needs. This is something that we’ll be trying to push forward towards the end of the year. It is not a G-7 initiative in the sense that this is G-7 exclusive or that this can only be brought forward by the G-7. But it lives out of what people who engage in that alliance are willing to bring into it and are willing to carry forward. How might this platform be used to galvanize nontraditional donors and get them to understand the severity of the crisis and pay up? I would try not to limit the discussion to being a donor and paying because this is only one role you can play in the whole of it. The idea behind the alliance is precisely to bring more stakeholders on and get past that “here’s a donor, here’s a recipient” thinking. The idea is — we’re in the middle of a crisis, right? And a crisis, as cynical as that may sound, also bears the opportunity to bring things forward, and I think we need to be able to combine two things: One is the immediate crisis reaction. We need to make sure, to put it very bluntly, to have as few people starving as possible. There have been people starving before the war and it’s likely we can’t reduce that to zero very quickly but to limit the number of people who are starving as best possible … That’s a human responsibility. The second responsibility is to do that in a way to create the right paths to a more sustainable future in agrifood systems. So do the right thing now, but do it in a way that will also trigger a chain reaction of doing the right things later on. It sounds like you see this moment as an opportunity for systemic change? Yes I would say that, although we really have to make sure not to sound cynical around [the relationship between] crisis and opportunity. This is a very terrible crisis and we need to make sure that we react properly to that crisis. But of course crisis always catalyzes change. It does whether or not we want it to. And we need to make sure that that catalyzing of change happens in the right way.